


white noise

by celestial_nova



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Alternative Perspective, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, During Canon, Gen, HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIRIGIRI, Introspection, and all of its side effects, it's kyoko centric with a dash of naegiri because im selfish, kind of???, kirigiri repressing her emotions: the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26867224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestial_nova/pseuds/celestial_nova
Summary: "She could recall the basics about herself: family name, Kirigiri; given name, Kyoko; 17 years old and 167 centimeters tall. But aside from that, everything else was... blank. Completely and utterly blank."or: kirigiri kyoko, a killing game, and the amnesia that she convinces herself she doesn't care about (and maybe, just maybe, she'll find herself in the end)
Relationships: Kirigiri Kyoko/Naegi Makoto
Comments: 16
Kudos: 58





	white noise

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday kiri ilysm

When Kyoko woke, something felt… off. 

She blinked, unusually groggy, and with no memory of when, where, or why she had fallen asleep. Her neck was sore, and there was a dull throb in the back of her head. Had she been mugged? No, her hands would have bound if she was, or her mouth would have been gagged. As it was, she was sitting, unrestrained, in a plain, uncomfortable chair. 

She swept her eyes around the room, taking in every detail with practiced precision. Banners with odd phrases framed a chalkboard with off-kilter drawings. There were metal plates on the wall where there should be windows. The wallpaper was loud and chaotic. She had no memory of the strange classroom, which was the only detail that made any sense - she was starting a new year at a new school, Hope’s Peak Academy. 

Kyoko furrowed her brows. Why had she switched schools? 

She shook her head, a sharp and quick movement, as an attempt at a refresher. She knew she had a reason for coming to Hope’s Peak, and she knew it was important. So why couldn’t she remember it?

Following that realization, the astonishing amount of things she  _ couldn’t  _ remember began to pile up endlessly. Why was she here? Where was she before? Who did she live with? Who were her friends? Her family? Who was  _ she _ ? Panic rose from her stomach, choking up in her throat. Why couldn’t she remember anything?  _ Why couldn’t she remember anything? _ She needed to remember. She needed to get out of here. She needed to remember.  _ She needed to get out of here- _

Kyoko slammed her hands on the table, her chair making a loud  _ screech _ as it was shoved back. But in her rush to stand, she hit her thigh against the edge of the desk, sending a sharp stab of pain into her leg. The grounding feeling brought her panic to a halt, the racing thoughts and swirling emotions slowing down to a standstill. 

She took a breath of still, stuffy air, and everything washed away. She didn’t have time to scream and cry and worry aimlessly; there were more pressing matters to attend to. 

She could recall the basics about herself: family name, Kirigiri; given name, Kyoko; 17 years old and 167 centimeters tall. But aside from that, everything else was... blank. Completely and utterly blank. She closed her eyes, pouring all of her concentration into searching the vast  _ nothing  _ behind her eyelids for something,  _ anything  _ about herself; all she got was a faint ringing, quiet and muffled, like white noise. 

In an effort to drown out the sound, she switched her concentration to her surroundings. She still knew hardly anything about her current circumstances, and had to learn as much as she could as soon as possible. Almost immediately, an investigative sort of instinct came over as she combed through the classroom; in the back of her mind, a quiet voice wondered where it came from. 

(She could hardly hear it over the white noise, which seemed insistent upon staying. Eventually, she gave up on trying to fight it.)

* * *

It didn’t surprise her that the mastermind had a motive prepared. After all, despite the constant death threats slung around school hallways, did you really expect a teenager to resort to murder so quickly? Without a push, that is.

Monokuma’s first little “push” took the form of a video. Kyoko slipped her disc into the slot, sliding on her headphones, but she didn’t watch it. Not yet. She let the others go first, waiting to gauge their reactions. Glancing over to the nearest occupied desk, she saw a picture of a girl - Asahina, she remembered - and a boy who looked similar to her, posed in front of a shelf crammed full of trophies. Without warning, the display glitched and tore; when it cleared, the wall had gained scratch marks and bloodstains, and she shelves were now askew, awards knocked to the ground in a jigsaw puzzle of memories. Asahina gasped, sharp and jagged, like the golden pieces of achievement littering the floor. 

That first reaction seemed to have triggered an avalanche, and her suspicions about the nature of the DVDs were confirmed as terrified shouts and cries filled the room. Without a single change to her visible expression, she steeled herself for whatever horrifying imagery would be thrown at her, and pressed play. 

It was blank.

But that wasn’t quite right. In reality, it was a crackling black and white, similar to TV static, with the accompanying buzz of malfunction humming through her headphones. She wasn’t surprised - it was an obvious attempt by the mastermind to jab at her loss of memory, likening her to a television without a signal. She was expected to sit there, hopelessly,  _ desperately  _ curious, while her “classmates” would watch in horror as their loved ones were used as leverage. She was supposed to want to know if she had anyone close to her, and if they were in danger. She would do anything to know.  _ Anything _ .

A horribly overdone cliche, she thought, as she pulled the headphones off with a little too much force. 

Horribly overdone. 

* * *

_ Kirigiri Kyoko wears gloves to hide terrible scars on her hands. _

Kyoko blinked at the words. A secret, Monokuma’s next enticement to kill. She supposed it wasn’t terribly unrealistic; most people harbored secrets, buried deep down in dark, repressed corners of the mind. Some people’s secrets were dark enough to blind them to morality. 

She remembered the scars. She didn’t even need to glance at her hands to map them out entirely in her mind. She supposed they weren’t that forgettable: dark, mottled and repulsive, looping around her skin in a grizzly collage. How could she forget something so marring, so hideous? 

Even so, the secret held little power over her. The scars’ origin had been wiped from her mind; nothing except a distant trace of betrayal remained. It tasted bitter in the back of her mouth, so she swallowed it down, pulling her gloves tighter. Out of sight, out of mind.

(And no, she  _ didn’t  _ think about it. It  _ didn’t  _ nag at her thoughts from the back of her mind for the rest of the day. And she  _ didn’t  _ lie in her bed that night, staring at her leather-cloaked hands, and mull over the past she had lost.)

* * *

“Because...I had a dream. And accepting a life here would have meant nothing less than giving up on my dream forever.”

Celestia Ludenberg - no, Yasuhiro Taeko - had a pleasant smile on her face as she spoke. It was the same expression she wore every day, no matter the circumstances. 

Except it  _ wasn’t _ . 

Hidden behind the fake accent and frilly clothes and porcelain poker face was something like disappointment; something just shy of remorse, just shy of grief, mourning over a fantasy torn just out of reach.

Kyoko wondered what it would be like to have a dream. She wondered what it would be like to have something she desired enough to place nothing more than blind faith in it. To want something so desperately that she would sacrifice someone else’s life to manifest it. 

Maybe she had something like that. Maybe she didn’t. 

And as the firetruck came crashing down, she wondered if it would be worth it to remember. 

* * *

Ogami Sakura betrayed them over a building. Kyoko knew it was more complicated than that - the building was a family legacy, steeped in sentiment and emotional value - but in the end, it was nothing more than architecture. And now she was dead. 

Connections were weak, she reminded herself. Sentimentality was a liability. Having something or someone to care about that much was like painting a target on her own back. It was a creed burned into her mind, something she just  _ knew _ without remembering who taught it to her or why they did. 

She wasn’t jealous of Ogami, a fool who died for four walls and connections. 

She  _ wasn’t.  _

* * *

Kyoko finally remembered something, as she watched the conveyor carry Naegi Makoto (at an agonizingly slow pace, as if time had stalled to taunt her) towards the execution she had sentenced him to. 

It wasn’t an event that she remembered; no faces or names managed to break through the fog that was her mind. It was the churning in her stomach as she watched her ally- partner-  _ friend  _ inch closer and closer to death that was familiar; it was how the weight of someone else’s life felt like sickening deja vu. 

Guilt, apparently, was something she knew quite well. 

(And, oh, how she regretted criticizing Ogami as the weight of her liability pulled her to the ground.) 

* * *

When she hit the floor of the garbage room, wrapped in bags of trash, something struck loose. 

It felt like a rockslide, one stone dislodged that sent the rest tumbling down. Voices, images, and emotions flooded her mind in a rush of sensations that made her dizzy. There were still gaps and blanks - blurred-out faces and muffled voices - but the fog had finally,  _ finally _ lifted. She just had to sift through the overload, and luckily, there was one word that stood out:

_ Detective.  _

One word that summed her up completely: her talent, her past, her entire sense of self. She clung to it, held it close, basking in the way it made her feel concrete. It was a tether, keeping her from drifting out of existence, guiding her back into herself. 

“What was that…?”

A small, shaky, and heartbreakingly familiar voice brought her back to the surface, and Kyoko was reminded of her reason for jumping down a trash chute. She was here to save Naegi from the cruel fate she had assigned him, that despite all odds he had managed to survive. 

Momentarily forgotten guilt crashed back over her, but with it came an immeasurable feeling of relief. The contrast between the two caused her to hesitate, a foreign feeling that left her frozen in place. It didn’t help that her head was still swimming in her newly-remembered past. Memories and flashbacks, a twisting knife in her stomach, a heart that may have missed a few beats - it was all too much. 

“...did a giant piece of trash just fall down here...?”

Unbidden, a smile came to her face at Naegi’s genuine confusion, and her racing thoughts began to slow. She took a breath (which, due to the stench, she immediately regretted), gathering up her composure; she could rediscover herself later. 

There were more important things - more important  _ people _ \- to worry about. 

* * *

Six teenagers (or were they adults now, forced to grow up too fast, even outgrowing the two years they had lost?) stood in a ragged line, facing two heavy steel doors that looked out of place. Six out of the original fifteen - or rather sixteen, if she thought about it - which was less than half of the whole they started with.

None of them were whole, now.

Hiro had lost any sense of confidence he had, along with the crystal ball that had shattered what felt like months ago. Fukawa’s (and, by proxy, Genocider Syo’s) most closely guarded secret had been ripped from her, cruelly on display to the world at large. Hina had formed a strong, irreplaceable bond, then lost it just as quickly, like whiplash. Togami, whose entire existence depended on his family’s legacy, was suddenly deserted, the last of a now hollow family line. And Naegi… Naegi had lost whatever innocence and naivety remained in his overflowing heart. 

Kyoko herself, who had started this whole ordeal nearly empty, was still hardly half of a person. Looking into her memory was like looking through old, dirty glass. Scattered smudges obscured chunks of her past, and even the things she could recall were hazy. She couldn’t even grieve with the others; her selection of things to mourn were nine people she barely got the chance to know, a skeleton in a box, and all of the things she would never remember (and can you really mourn for something if you can’t remember it?).

But maybe that a blessing rather than a curse. She wasn’t okay, and likely wouldn’t be for a while, but at the very least she was better off than the others. Without the same feeling of loss the other survivors suffered, the burden on her mind wasn’t as heavy; maybe she could shoulder some of the weight of theirs. The idea was a surprise to her - she didn’t remember when she had started to care that much - but it wasn’t one she felt like disregarding. 

(It still didn’t fill the emptiness in her heart, threatening to expand and swallow her whole.)

To her right, Naegi pressed a shaking finger to the glaring red button on the remote, Enoshima’s final parting gift. A low rumble filled the air, and as a scar of light split the metal doors in two, she felt Naegi’s hand wrap around her own, giving it a gentle squeeze when she didn’t pull away. 

The message behind the gesture was clear, even to her - _“_ _ you’re not alone _ . _ ” _

Kyoko looked over with an unfamiliar warmth in her chest, and when she met Naegi’s eyes, he smiled. It was small and scared but still so  _ bright _ , brighter than the outside world rushing to meet them, and Kyoko realized all at once that the present and future were far more significant than the past. 

She threaded their fingers together, and the white noise began to fade. 

**Author's Note:**

> *banging pots and pans together* IT'S KIRIGIRI DAY!!! KIRIGIRI KYOKO AND NO ONE ELSE. IT'S HER DAY ONLY
> 
> gonna be honest with y'all, i wrote this like. a year ago. and just revised a bit (read: a lot) of it so i could post something for kirigiri's birthday!!! march ended like 6 days ago and october hit me over the head before i saw it coming. kirigiri deserves better this, she is so smart and cool and so complex and has so many emotions that she represses for the sake of truth but she cares so much and i just. i love her okay
> 
> also thank you to my friend who beta'd last minute even tho i've never asked you to before, you're a lifesaver and ilysm
> 
> ANYWAYS thanks for reading my dumb notes, drop a kudos if you liked the fic!! maybe a comment that's always sexy........ okay i'll go back into social isolation bye <3


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